rapturerebornmmorpgfandomcom-20200216-history
Land of Pictures
Sitemap Picture Commentary : Click on Picture to see a full version. Of course there was a third option : That Schrodlinger couldnt get the cat to stay in the box... This is what Trolleys from the 40s looked like. Pacific Electric Trolley (Los Angeles) from LA Noire. 30's era trolley system equipment. They lasted until the very early 60s. Columbia allegedly built for a Worlds Fair would have transportation for fairgoers, with period styled vehicles taking them around to see the Showcase City In The Sky. Unfortunately, Infinite BS only needed it as a game mechanism, and even that was severely modified and curtailed to a shadow of what it should have been. Back in the early days when computers used tubes and early transistors were extremely expensive(like $50-$100 each), computer memory capacity was a significant problem. The Selectron was a type of memory that stored its bits using phosphor fluorescence as its storage method. This tube could hold 256 'bits' and a row of them (along with a pile of tube electronics the size of a small car) gave the computer its Read And Write Memory (RAM), used to hold programs and working data. Within a few years, this was superceded by much cheaper/more compact Magnetic Core memory, which lasted into the 70s and the manufacture of IC memory. A Selectron memory tube with the capacity of 4096 bits, which wasn't produced successfully (this was the late 40s, early 50's). William's Tubes worked similarly (much larger and shaped more like a display CRT). The guts of one of Fink Mfg. Vending Machines in Columbia. Are all those strange openings the slots for Bullion and Jewelry that were 'money' in Infinite BS? Somewhere there is a Bill slot so customers have less a problem when some items cost as much as $4000 (is it any wonder virtually noone in Columbia used Fink's Vigors when they cost most than someones yearly income ?) Passenger section from the Zeppelin Hindenburg. Columbia might have been built minus the Quantum Bullshit (sorry QM has nothing to do with levitation, you might as well have said Pixie Dust). But Lighter Than Air technologies might be plausible as long as the 'brick' is false decorative tinplate and much of the solid building mass is the equivalent of styrofoam. There would be a stadium-sized helium balloon above each City Block. Columbia would be orbitting the World pushed by a Jet Stream - giant sails allowing tacking to steer it a bit. Let them develop some Solar Power early to give them something to work with to power the city. Leave off the bad fantasy pseudo-science crap and concentrate on the circa 1900 social issues (real ones) for the dystopiac plot. Fairly complicated looking control display (looks like a Mercury Rocket Capsule), if you compare it to even modern day railroad engine controls. I can see some manager telling the asset artist "needs more lights and things"... Yes, Bioshocks Iconic image wasnt original. Artists' idea of what a 'trolley car' is. Too small, too narrow, no seats inside, track length virtually useless. A caricature that the word 'poor' doesnt even spell its patheticness. The Metro Trolleys would have been the backbone component of Rapture's Transit system, carrying the bulk of its passengers (versus the more expensive Bathysphere component). Very bizarre Trolley car. May have been an older 'Freight' type car which had to be reactivated/used for passengers after Atlas's terrorists had wrecked more recent passenger type Trolleys. More Cardpunch machine. I actually long ago had to use one of these. You get a letter wrong and you start over on a new blank card. They seem to be used in place of a 'terminal' in Minervas Den, which it really isnt. You punch a bunch of cars, then take your stack of cards (sometimes a very large stack) and put it into a card reader machine. That 'batch' submits your program, it runs, and your output is printed out on a large Line Printer machine. This one appears to have a label 'Ryan' which could indicate that Ryan owned a compuer equipment company. Card Punches were used by many businesses to generate cards for accounting, billing, inventory control, as well as programming. Many of the early computers were little more than semi-programmable tabulating machines that were fed their data via punchcards. The utterly useless short RTA Trolley tracks were a caricature in BS1 (they (the developers) didn't want to put any real effort into it, I guess...) But at the Olympus Heights end of Apollo Square's 'branch' of tracks, it looks as if they had the idea of the track continuing on to someplace else (looks intentionally blocked up). Now the other branches dont have these, so are still in a state of 'useless and pathetically incomplete'. A real (as in useful) Trolley system would have continuous lines crossing the city, often crisscrossing it to offer a multitude of connections between all the groups/clusters of buildings. Trolleys (rather than the inefficient/expensive taxicab-like Bathyspheres) would be the primary transit method, carrying the majority of the city's travelers/commuters. Notice that the Trolley Viaduct also can serve as a way to get from place to place by walking (or bicycling) if the Trolley is not working. "Who needs Quantum Bullshit when you have Clockwork goodness to drive you through the Aether ?" - Fink, commenting on his Clockwork Rocket Engine. The Tear opened up, and Fink gave the man 30 cases of Scotch as the other detailed how a thing called 'Warp Drive' worked. It probably can be used to keep 'recipes' and to write letters. Unfortunately, the Civil War interferened with McClendon's Spread Sheet program project, which would have made the thing actually useful. Cleaned up, but is really still the wrong design - an incredible lack of space inside for passengers. The Orange Trolley Car way above (from LA Noir) is more like what it should have been for the consolidated Rapture Transit Authority. Created by taking the Austin Transit Map (from BS1), and incorporating the (partial) AE Map diagram (from BS2), and filling in a few details and added building clusters. The solid black lines are 'streets' which the Trolleys go through. Mechanism that might have been used for the real Diving Hard Suits needed by Rapture's depth (sorry canvas diving apparatus wouldn't have worked until MUCH later when ADAM enhancement would have allowed divers to routinely work at pressure many times as much as the old diving gear -- that would be when the majority of Raptures construction was LONG finished). Hydraulic actuators eliminated complicated wrist and finger joints and seals which are problematic at the pressures Rapture was built at. This Bathysphere model which could raise itself from the water (via a ramp) would have been the real 'Automobile of Rapture', greatly simplifying the facilities required to maintain these vehicles. The thing still weighed 15 tons (equaling the amount of water it displaced) but would have been far more practical for Raptures growing suburbs. Its teardrop shape (the epitome of streamlining) allowed the models built to win several Bathysphere Racing Competitions just before Raptures Civil War started. More Diagram modified to make better sense Self Cleaning Toilet created by Fink that Suchong wanted to steal the design for... How many "good" ending now if they looked like this ? Even moreso if they all sounded like the zombies in World War Z... 1940s era "Super-Power" steam locomotive which existed alongside military Jet planes and the V2 Rocket - yet for mundane things older technology is always leveraged. The old canvas suits (on right) didnt hold out the water pressure (were pumped up to the pressure of the depth they operated in) and thus subjected the diver to sideeffects like 'the bends' and nitrogen narcosis. The Hard Suit held out the pressure (its at sea level pressure inside) but at cost of being much more complicated and clumsy/limited (the canvas suits werent that great to begin with), but could operate at greater depths. Evolution of the Columbia Skyhook that would have fit the original track mechanism -- that with a chain drive running inside C-Rails. The large version - the teeth fit between the chain's links to pull the User along - fixed speed, non-reversable (you had to switch rails ??). Either way, dropping down to grab it didnt work mechanically (lucky because doing that would pull one or more of your joints out of their sockets). . . . . ---- ----